Book Review: Permission to Speak
I haven’t talked about books recently, but I’ve finished several great ones lately.
I really loved “Permission to Speak” by Samara Bay recently. This was a great read for a few reasons:
1) The framing of empowerment (more geared to female empowerment, but not solely) and dismantling and delineating of assumptions about speaking
2) The copious easy, fun, and effective exercises of breathing and voice
3) The actionable tips on not just the practice of speaking (though that’s in there) but the psychology of it
4) The research based focus and constant reference
Loved it!
Image Description: The cover of “Permission to Speak” by Samara Bay, which says “Permission” 6 times vertically before the “To Speak”. The subtitle reads, “How to Change What Power Sounds Like, Starting with You”. The picture is clearly from an eReader (my Kindle) because it shows a “Back to” pop up. This image was originally posted in a LinkedIn book review post.
I’m not “bothered” by speaking, but I also don’t necessarily seek it frequently. I’m introverted by nature, and I also have a habit of diminishing my voice. I’ve worked on this in informal settings (especially text based, like sending a message) and gotten over the idea “Someone else will say it better” or “I don’t need to speak here”. But it’s still in my head. I dislike any speaking feels self promotional, self aggrandizing, etc. and it can be uncomfortable to speak in certain settings aloud due to this.
I really liked this quote on that issue, from the book:
“But if you consciously shift to thinking, I’m here to help my audience, you can disarm the panic button. Sounds tiny, right? But when we choose to look out at our audience with kindness and offer what we’ve got with generosity, we actually trigger an entirely different physiological response. The walls come down and we free ourselves to be ourselves. Which is not tiny at all.”
I remember learning about servant leadership years ago and the feeling of freedom it brought. I had led things in my life but always diminished it. I felt oxymoronic, because I did and do often seek leadership, but many ideas of leadership don’t resonate with me or even bother me. Speaking is like leadership. I understand there are good reasons people speak for themselves, that there’s not some inherent shame in self promotion, but really if we can think of our audience and what we hope to provide, if we can be helpful, if we can be servant leaders as speakers, we can get away from all that ego attached to speak and it’s much easier to give ourselves permission. At least it is for me.
(Of course some of this is my “socialization” and programming, some which I should maybe challenge more than I do—women are too often raised to be helpers and of course that’s why servant leadership may resonate. But I’m okay going with the grain of what works even in the face of what I know is bad and unfair socialization. Sometimes you can’t rewrite the whole programming of your socialization, but you can drop in a few lines of code to create a new function that adapts it to work better for what you want.)
Anyway, that’s my midweek book review. It’s a good read and I suggest it!
