Using Your Voice to Tap Your Strength

Take a walk down any main street in Manhattan, and someone’s going to try to talk to you.

They want to ask if you’ll donate to a good cause. They want to know where you get your hair done so they can offer you a deal at a local salon. They want to know if you’re Jewish (yes, that’s a thing).

Live here long enough and you learn to steer clear of anyone waving at you while holding a clipboard. More concerning, however, is the guy without a clipboard or a company shirt or really any clear agenda whatsoever, who says, “Can I ask you a question?”

The default answer is no. Or, if I’m feeling saucy, “You just did.” Without breaking pace.

I used to pretend I was in a hurry, or that I was on the phone—or worse, apologize that I couldn’t stop to chat. It felt like I was being cold or mean by ignoring them.

I’ve been living here for over a decade. I don’t apologize for shit anymore.

It took me a while to get here, though. Because as a rule, we (especially women) are taught to be polite, accommodating, and never hurt someone’s feelings.

I’ve also been binging episodes of Morbid: A True Crime Podcast, and while every story is gruesome in its own way, most of them rhyme: Women who were lured, trapped, or talked into deadly situations because they didn’t want to be rude.

This fear — of not being nice, pleasing, or accommodating — might mean getting stuck in sidewalk conversations you don’t want to be in (or worse).

But the same fear that keeps you from speaking up on the street may also keep you from making meaningful contributions elsewhere. And while you may think accommodating makes that moment easier, it doesn’t actually make your life any better.

If you don’t speak up, you’re still saying something: Namely, that you don’t have a preference or opinion, that you’re cool with what anyone else wants. And if you keep doing that, people will begin to believe you.

Your voice is stronger than you think (and that may be what scares you)

In the workshops I lead for helping people access their stories, ideas, and creativity, participants will tell me they want to bust through a creative block and express themselves but haven’t found their voice.

What they often mean is that they don’t think they have the confidence they need to speak up, and they’re waiting until they do to use their voice.

What’s more, they may believe they don’t have anything of value to share or that what they think doesn’t matter (wrong). They believe they need to be stronger, more interesting, or more like someone else to be significant. Also wrong.

I’d like to argue the opposite: You already are strong, and down deep you know it.

Why else might you think that to use your voice—to weigh in, to speak up—you’ll interrupt everything, offend everyone, ruin your reputation? You’d have to have a pretty powerful tool to do that much damage.

We think we need more confidence to use our voices. But we have it backwards: What we need is to trust what the gut says and use our voices as an extension of it.

But first, it’s important to understand just how much you need that voice.

Why not speaking up is the riskiest of all

A report by the World Health Organization in 2018 estimates that up to 70 percent of women in the U.S. have experienced some kind of sexual or physical abuse. A 2014 study found that nearly 20 percent of women are raped at some point in their lives, and nearly 44 percent experience some kind of sexual violence—not including rape or even other physical violence. Staggering.

When I was just out of college back in the 90s, I knew there were risks living as a woman in a major metropolitan area. I had a weird scare one day when I kept spotting the same guy all day — first in a parking lot, then, in the library, and then outside of a convenience store (I was terrified to go outside and waited until he was gone).

Nothing happened, but I was quite aware that this man might have been a threat. I also knew two summers of Tae Kwon Do wasn’t going to cut it if I ever found myself in another scary situation. So while I was laid up recovering from rotator cuff surgery, I picked up some light reading: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signs that Protect Us from Violence by Gavin de Becker.

De Becker is widely regarded as the nation’s leading expert on the protection of public figures and has earned three Presidential appointments for his work in the prediction and prevention of violence. And his entire book is story after harrowing story about what it can cost us if we don’t listen to our voices, and use them.

He also recommends a self-defense program called IMPACT, which he calls the best self-defense course for women. And I signed up.

The class was held in the basement of a temple in Brookline, MA, and my instructor Marie was a clone of Jodie Foster, which I found very heartening (wouldn’t you want Jodie Foster whispering in your ear during a fight?).

This wasn’t about learning a few tricks for getting out of zip ties. IMPACT helps you do some serious heavy lifting around incredibly triggering issues and scenarios—mentally, emotionally, and physically. You learn about the nature of violence, what tends to happen, what mistakes people make.

You also learn the right way to drop a guy. Hard.

I was there hoping to ward off trouble; many of my fellow students, however, had already faced off with it, by strangers as well as people they knew…and loved. Their therapists had suggested the program to discover their power and rewrite their story, to witness themselves fighting back.

You practice drills, learn techniques. And then, you await your turn on the mat, or as Marie would say, “Another day, another dark alley,” in which you experience actual physical confrontations with men dressed up as “assailants” in heavily padded sumo suits that can withstand your punches and kicks. When you walk across the mat, something will happen, but you have no idea what.

Until then, I’d never struck anyone. It’s pretty rare that any of us, women in particular, get to experience the full force of our own strength—especially in combat.

Why you can’t channel your full strength without using your voice

When I threw my first knee into the man’s well-padded groin, Marie blew her whistle and paused the exercise.

“You didn’t use your voice.”

OK, so? Didn’t my amazing knee strike make up for that? Turns out, no.

“If you’re not using your voice, you’re not breathing, and if you’re not breathing, you’re not tapping your full strength,” she said. “Tell him no! Call for help!”

This proved to be one of the hardest things for me to do, actually; to use my voice as a weapon of self defense. If we speak at all to strangers, it’s usually to apologize. (How many times have you said “Sorry!” when someone bumps into you? Same.)

In Tae Kwon Do, we were taught to use the kihap, the shout you make when you strike. I felt weird about it then, too. Kihap combines ki, which means energy or life force, and hup, which means to gather or concentrate—thus, a shout that harnesses your energy.

Using your voice when you strike does a few things: ensures you’re breathing effectively; increases confidence, power, and speed; even helps you protect your body by bracing your core and causing you to exhale so you don’t get the wind knocked out of you.

Your voice, in other words, is not just a metaphor for your personality or opinion; it’s an actual, physical thing which allows you to channel power and release energy. Not to mention scare the fuck out of the other person.

So you must train it as you would any other muscle, not by saving it til you need it, but by using it regularly. And if you don’t, you actually won’t know what you’re capable of. And you certainly won’t be able to tap your true strength.

I hated this part, felt awkward and self-conscious. But I got over it. And the first time I really let loose on my voice, my knee shot that padded assistant a few inches into the air. “Wouldn’t want to meet that knee on the street,” he said later.

And I wasn’t the only one who had discovered her power through voice.

I watched a fragile-looking woman in her 60s, who looked like she couldn’t slam a door, knock the assailant off his feet by the third week with a terrifying roar. We hooted and cheered (“Go Joanne!”). She was different when she left there. We all were.

Wielding a sharp elbow and knocking mock assailants on Tuesday nights left me feeling buzzy and bruising for a fight. I would walk to my car thinking, “Just try me motherfucker, just try.”

At graduation, you don’t line up to crack a piece of wood in half and earn your yellow belt. You invite your friends and family to come watch you get assaulted in front of an audience—and then fight your way out of it.

Over the course of the hour, the audience goes from shifting uncomfortably in folding metal chairs to hollering and clapping. We all left there in high spirits. I was feeling particularly exuberant.

At the time, local news had been covering a serial rapist roaming downtown Boston. “We should all go down there and get this guy!” I said.

“No we should not,” said Jodie Foster.

Tune in to your intuition — the voice that knows

The goal is not to go around picking fights, but to avoid them. And while the physical tactics and responses drilled into us over the course of that program were incredibly valuable, they are useless if we don’t listen to our intuition—that voice that guides our choices and decisions all the time about what to do, or avoid.

We often talk about intuition as if it were some magical, mythical thing, a superhuman ability. But it’s actually quite human.

De Becker writes, “Intuition connects us to the natural world and to our nature. Freed from the bonds of judgment, married only to perception, it carries us to predictions we will later marvel at.”

You experience it all the time. Maybe you felt distinctly uneasy about a person or situation—even if you couldn’t explain how you knew. As DeBecker says, intuition is “knowing without knowing why.” Because our brains are pattern-seeking machines, we can recognize when something feels “off” even if we haven’t analyzed it in detail. It works fast.

Our instructor Marie made it clear that the point of learning this approach to self defense wasn’t to walk around rigid with fear and ready to strike all day. Because operating at such a heightened level of fear might cause you to drown out signals you can only pick up on when you’re aware and relaxed.

There are other things that block our intuition. In an article for ForbesWomen, Sarah Jeanne Brown writes that common intuitive blocks include “overthinking, ‘shoulds,’ bias, approval seeking, when you really want something, and even trauma.”

In other words, you might be talking yourself out of what intuition is trying to tell you by rationalizing and justifying, telling yourself, “Oh I’m being ridiculous, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” or “I need to be reasonable here, I shouldn’t overreact.”

Intuition is also based on expertise, which is why a cop with 20 years on the job will see things in a situation intuitively that you or I might miss. And so we also need to train that intuition, which is what Marie did in those fight scenarios in class.

In a typical scenario with an assailant in class, you might find yourself on the ground, trying to get free. Marie would stay behind you, just off to the side, calmly telling you what steps to take next, reminding you to breathe, and giving you the cues for when to strike back, so that you could learn to see those moments yourself — and act on them.

Hearing that voice, those calm, clear instructions, coaching me through fight after fight, hour after hour, taught me how to listen, not flail. For a long time I heard Marie’s voice in my head. But now, I hear my own.

How to sharpen your intuition

Brown includes some insights and tips for supporting your intuition, which I’ll paraphrase here:

• Take time to check in. Intuitive people, she writes, are prone to introspection; they pay attention to what’s happening in and around them, scan their bodies from time to time to see how they’re feeling, and then allowing themselves to feel it without shame or embarrassment.
• Unplug. Alone. Brown says that the highly intuitive take breaks, unplug, go for walks, and allow for some quiet time outdoors. It makes sense that to become in tune with our nature, we should spend some time in it.
• Nurture your creativity. I love this one. This doesn’t mean you have to take up watercolors; it means that allowing yourself to explore your creativity can strengthen that natural ability, too—and creative people are often also the most resourceful and more likely to come up with interesting solutions to problems.

“Getting out of your own head can actually lead to more intuitive thinking,” she writes. “The benefits are that you find yourself, you make the right choice, you take chances, and you take action where others will not.”

When you use your voice, you make yourself known

The irony is that people who take the IMPACT program are less likely to ever use it—simply because of the way they carry themselves. They don’t look like they can be picked easily off the herd.

And, no, I haven’t had the chance to use what my boyfriend refers to as “The People’s Elbow.” Yet.

After years of teaching self defense, our instructor Marie must have maxed out on crime fighting; she went back to school for massage therapy, moved to Virginia Beach, and opened a spa.

And while I am not a trained IMPACT instructor, I do teach people to defend and advocate for themselves and their ideas by using their voices—on the page, on stage, on Zoom, anywhere. I tell people in my workshops and programs again and again: You can’t wait for confidence first; you earn it by exercising courage.

The more you trust in your voice and your strength, the more confident you become. That is, in fact, what you see when you behold a confident person: You’re seeing someone who has learned to trust themselves.

Keep practicing. Then, come to the streets of New York to test your skills. We can spend the day walking around and not apologizing to people. Which is what I’ll be doing anyway.