Unlearning Silence: Speaking Up At Work

Key Takeaways

Our CEO and Founder, Jessica Chen, recently hosted a Soulcast Media | LIVE event on LinkedIn where she interviewed Author & Lecturer, Harvard Law School, Elaine Lin Hering. They shared tips and personal stories about how to unlearn silence and speak confidently at work.

Here are the takeaways for VIP Comm Pass members:

• It can be really difficult to speak up at work because of our internal dialogue.
• Silence can be editing out parts of ourselves or when there isn't enough room for us to express our ideas.
• Having to edit or silence ourselves keeps our nervous system on high alert.
• We have to unlearn the ways we are silencing ourselves. We can ask ourselves, in what ways have I learned to be silent? In what ways am I silencing the people around me? 
• We need to be proactive and design our communication flows, which means giving ourselves license to play to our communication strengths. If written communication is easier for us, create ways to offer thoughts through email, slack, etc.

• When we set people's expectations on how they will hear from us, it makes getting our ideas heard much easier.
• We can frame to our managers why it is in their interest to hear our thoughts and ideas in the way we prefer to communicate. Articulating why it is a benefit for the team is key when framing your communication flow.
• Finding and identifying our why for speaking up will help us move past mental chatter we may have for not wanting to speak up.
• One way to boost our confidence to speak up, is to participate in low-stakes activities. For example, asking a ride-share driver to lower the backseat window. 
• When we participate in low-stakes activities, it can increase our data points and remind us that we were capable of speaking up, we were heard, and it had an impact.
• If we say what we want to say, and ask for what we want, the worst thing someone can say is no. And even if we do hear a no, we can learn something about ourselves or our situation in the process. Expecting resistance can lessen the negative impact of not getting what we asked for.
• Having an advocate who nudges us to the person we want to be will help us unlearn silence.
• There are so many expectations others have of us, or we have ourselves, of what our voices should look and sound like. And often, these expectation models do not include our whole selves. Each of us has a voice that is going to look and sound different than anyone else's.

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