You Don’t Find Your Voice. You Remove What’s Managing It.

You Don’t Find Your Voice. You Remove What’s Managing It.

The blog pipeline runs on voice dictation, and the discovery that came from that was simple but it took me a long time to understand: when I speak without editing, the material is more specific, more vulnerable, more distinctly me than anything I could compose from a blank page and a keyboard. The voice is already there in the spoken material waiting to be heard; it’s the editing that usually buries it in the process of making it sound acceptable and presentable and safe. So the work isn’t to find the voice; the work is to not lose it in the process of making it publishable.

This is different from what we usually tell people about voice, you know, we usually talk about voice as something you develop and build and cultivate and create, and we make it sound like a project with stages and milestones, and people sit down and they try to develop a voice and it’s agonizing because they’re trying to create something from nothing when actually what they need to do is remove the layers of management that are covering up what’s already there. When students in my class write or design for the first time, first version is usually close to who they actually are, still has some of the rough edges and the specificity that comes from not yet being sure whether they’re allowed to be that specific. Then they ask for feedback and they get it, and the second version is safer, more conventional, more managed, more aware of how it looks to other people.

The feedback didn’t develop their voice; it added a filter, and I’ve spent a lot of time teaching the difference between feedback that helps a voice be clearer and feedback that teaches a voice to hide. Some feedback says “here’s where your specificity is landing really powerfully, how can you strengthen that,” and some feedback says “that’s too specific, tone it down, make it more general so it won’t offend anyone,” and the second kind of feedback teaches the voice to go underground. Most people never recover from that; they keep feeding underground voices because it’s safer and because they’ve been rewarded for it since about third grade.

In the trance states during the 90-minute treadmill sessions, the management layer goes quiet, the part of the brain that’s monitoring and evaluating and deciding whether what you’re about to say is acceptable, and the ideas that arrive have no filter on them because there’s nobody home to filter them. That’s where the authentic material comes from, and I’ve been doing versions of this through self-hypnosis and meditation since I read a Psychology Today article about it in high school, 45 years ago. The practice is simple: find the state where the critic goes quiet, and capture what’s underneath it. Don’t edit it, don’t shape it, just get it into a form where it can be looked at later, because the moment the critic wakes up, it starts managing again.

What I’ve learned is that voice isn’t something you’re born with and it isn’t something you develop; it’s something that you already have and that you’ve been covering up with management since you were small enough to notice other people’s disapproval. The voice is underneath all the layers of strategic thinking about what’s appropriate and what might upset someone and what the right answer is supposed to be. Your actual voice is weirder than that and more specific than that and more vulnerable than that, and if you can create conditions where the management layer goes quiet long enough to hear it, you can recover it.

This is the thing I’m learning from voice dictation and trance states and AI conversations, that removing is different from adding, and most people spend their energy trying to add things when they should be focused on removing things. You don’t add a voice to your writing; you remove the management that’s been suppressing your voice. You don’t develop authenticity; you remove the layers of strategic thinking about what you’re supposed to be. You don’t build confidence; you remove the doubt that’s been taught into you since childhood. The voice is always there; the question is whether you’re willing to let it be heard.

The moment I started doing voice dictation instead of typing was the moment the voice changed because the voice that comes out when you’re speaking is closer to the truth than the voice that comes out when you’re writing, because writing has time in it to edit and doubt and second-guess, and speaking doesn’t, and if you capture the speaking voice before the management can get to it, you’ve got something real. That’s why the phone is always in my hand during the treadmill sessions; I’m racing to get the voice down before the critic wakes up and starts managing what I just said.

What I want to tell anyone who thinks they don’t have a voice or they haven’t found their voice yet is that you have one, it’s been there the whole time, and the work isn’t to find it, it’s to stop hiding it. The management layer is so strong after 30 or 40 years of being taught what’s appropriate that it feels like that’s your actual voice, like that cautious filtered version is the real you, and it takes a lot of work to believe that there’s something underneath it that’s more true. But the moment you let yourself speak without editing, the moment you put down something on the page without deciding in advance whether it’s good or acceptable or appropriate, you hear it, you hear the actual voice underneath the management, and you realize it’s been waiting for permission the whole time.