Women and Speaking Up - Kathy Caprino

Women and Speaking Up On Saturday, I was a guest along with a terrific communications consultant Diane DiResta  on a  neat radio show: Live with Lisa! Radio â€" hosted by Lisa Wexler. The lively and revealing discussion centered around the issue of women and reinvention, career transition, and speaking up with power and purpose. Check it out!   Here’s the full show.   Speaking up with authenticity and power for women is very challenging.   Our diffiulties in speaking up, I believe, are  less about our inherent capabilities and more about our “nurture” experience â€" how we’ve been raised and culturally trained to “be and act” as women. In my book Breakdown, Breakthrough, I’ve written an entire chapter specifically about this issue (Chapter 7: Speaking Up with Power), and I offer concrete approaches to overcoming this challenge.   There are three overarching steps to take when you can’t speak up for yourself:   Step Back: to explore past trauma you’ve experienced in speaking up Let Go: of your fear and negativity around expressing yourself Say Yes! to your personal power through your every word and action   Taking steps to gain power in expressing yourself leads to true breakthrough, and to the ultimate experience of using your voice to positively impact your work, family, community, and the world.   Breaking it down, here’s what needs to happen to have a breakthrough in your personal expression:   1) Say what you need and want to Each moment of each day, identify exactly what you want to say, and begin saying it â€" without being overly-emotional, state your views with surety, confidence, and self-trust.     Think about the conversation you most need to have today to move forward in life or work, and have it!   2) Use positive language always As the fabulous little book The Four Agreements explains, one key to personal freedom is for you to agree to “Be Impeccable With Your Word.” This means to avoid sinning against yourself or anyone else through your words. Watch your language at all times â€" is it negative, diminishing, demeaning, or lacking in hope or possibility? If so, change it!   3) Heal past suppression Most women have experienced at some point in their lives a  traumatic time in which they were criticized, punished or worse for speaking up. (By the way, men don’t experience this challenge in the same way, for a number of reasons.) If you’re afraid to speak up, get some help from an empowered mentor, coach, or therapist who can lead you away from your fear of communicating your true self, and help you heal. You didn’t experience this trauma so that you’d remain silent your whole life. You experienced it in order to move through it, once and for all.   Now’s the time to be all you came to be in this lifetime, and you can’t do that if you don’t speak up.   Happy breakthroughs, Kathy